The lack of transparency depths has reached a new low….even for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities this week.

After holding their long-awaited “stakeholder” meeting for the draft 2024 Energy Master Plan, which is already past deadline, the BPU decided rather than giving the plan they would simply publish an executive summary slide deck which amounted to sixty-two pages of “data” and “charts” with zero references provided anywhere that would allow for peer review and informed feedback:

For comparison, the Draft 2019 New Jersey Energy Master Plan was 108 text pages (not slides) with 4 pages of endnotes and is based upon the 2019 Integrated Energy Plan (IEP) which was 124 text pages with 19 pages of sources, references, and notes that could be independently reviewed.

And don’t forget, this comes on the heels of the extensive redactions AENJ received on the advanced scope of work as you can see:

If the goal is to keep the public in the dark, that is just where they may end up as a resut of the BPU’s continued failures. But it’s extremely important that 2024 version of the EMP is still MIA because of just how much has changed since the 2019 version:

Remember, when this all started the BPU was still assuming that energy demand would go down and counting on wind. Now that those two legs have been kicked out, we need to see how to take a closer look to make the chair can actually stand.

At a time when energy prices are going up with the public demanding answers and change, the BPU decided to conitnue playing games by holding back and redacting what are very clearly public documents. So instead of facing the music they have decided to write a new song altogether. Forgive us if we waren’t in the mood to dance.